Product Recommendations

Product recommendations are dynamically generated using Commerce Cloud
Einstein. You can think of these as implicit recommendations―in
contrast to explicit
recommendations that directly link objects together.

How Product Recommendations Work

Product
recommendations require input data from three sources:

Data source

Description

Catalog

Product information stored in your
catalog is collected by running a catalog feed against
your Production instance.

Orders

Order information generated on your storefront is
collected by running an order feed against your Production
instance.

Clickstream

Clickstream data is automatically collected from
your site on a real-time basis using pixel tracking; you
don't have to perform any action to collect this
data.

The following activities are automatically
tracked:

Product View

Add To Cart

Finish Checkout

View Recommendation

This data is collected by Commerce Cloud Einstein,
which uses machine-learning models to analyze the collected data and
generate product recommendations.

Product recommendations take
the form of a list of product IDs (IDs of recommended products).
Before this list is passed to your storefront, the system applies
business rules―called recommenders―that you define in the
Configurator tool. The rules enable you to control the composition of
the list of product IDs, enabling you to remove some IDs, change the
order of IDs, and so on. In other words, the rules enable you to
control which products are shown, hidden, promoted, and
demoted.

When the storefront renders the final list of
recommended products, they are in the optimal order as defined by your
rules.

Product recommendations are rendered in a content slot. A
developer must define the content slot within an ISML template. After
the content slot is created, you can create slot configurations for
the slot. Your content slot configurations―whose Content Type must be
set to "Recommendation"―control which template is used to render the
recommended products. It also controls which business rules should be
applied to the list of recommended product IDs.

Implementing Product Recommendations

The
following table describes what steps must be performed to use product
recommendations, and describes who performs each step: